Systems exist to facilitate remote control of and access to a computer by an operator at a remote station. Such systems typically use a device or mechanism that enables an operator at a remote station to control aspects of a so-called target (or local) computer. More particularly, such systems typically allow a remote station to provide mouse and keyboard input to the target computer and further allow the remote station to view the video display output. These types of systems are typically called keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) systems.
Systems such as these allow a user to remotely access another computer and view its desktop when the desktop has a relatively static image typical of a computer desktop. However, when the desktop is playing a video, such as from a DVD, image quality, transmission and display suffers. Conventional KVM systems typically display relatively static remote computer desktops well. However, when motion video is displayed on the remote desktop, the Dambrackas Video Compression (DVC) scheme used in such systems does not encode the video well, and thus the displayed video does not appear with the same amount of motion as is appearing on the remote desktop.
In addition to the motion video not being displayed at its full frame rate, there is a noticeable degradation of performance in lag time of the mouse. Typically, with a relatively static screen, mouse lag time is short and acceptable. However, with full motion video, the mouse lag time can be long and can significant decrease the usefulness of the remote desktop to the user.
Conventional systems are not optimized to view motion video on a remote desktop system and do not efficiently display both static images and moving images together. Accordingly, there is a desire for a system to provide efficient remote viewing of both static and full motion video images, while reducing and mouse lag time.